Higher education in the United States is beset with a variety of crises, from skyrocketing tuition rates to the attendant ballooning student loan debt. Much has been written in the last several years, in particular, about the dire situation in which the humanities find themselves in the universities, as student enrollment in majors such as … Read more
The Greeks invented philosophy. They gave us Herodotus, the father of history, too. Their philosophy of history was cyclical, meaning they believed history had highs and lows, but lacked purpose. The Christian intellectual tradition first proposed that history moves in a linear fashion, corresponds with progress, and culminates with a utopian end point. Modern day … Read more
Prudence, writes Josef Pieper in The Christian View of Man, is the root of all the natural virtues, and there is an obvious reason why. It is the virtue of seeing reality as it is. There can be no true virtue without it, because the virtues are to be exercised among imperfect human beings, not among angels … Read more
The German Lutheran theologian Paul Tillich famously claimed that “God”—or “god”—is the name for what “concerns man ultimately.” What this means, says Tillich in the first volume of his Systematic Theology, is that “whatever concerns a man ultimately becomes god for him, and, conversely, it means that a man can be concerned ultimately only about … Read more
Opus Dei is a Catholic institution made up largely of lay people who believe that everyone is called to holiness and that ordinary life is a path to sanctity. The past forty years have seen several biographies of its founder, Monsignor Josemaria Escriva, who died in 1975 and was proclaimed a saint in 2002. By … Read more
In 1880, a number of Irish land tenants were evicted from lands held by the Right Honorable John Crichton, third Earl Erne, after failing to meet the demands of the agent employed by the absentee landlord. The land vacated by those former tenants then became available for other renters who were willing to accept the … Read more
The Book of Gomorrah, written in the eleventh century by St. Peter Damian, has now been published in a modern translation by Matthew Cullinan Hoffman, a journalist and graduate student at Holy Apostles College. To the original book Hoffman has added a useful introduction and copious notes. The book manages to be both scholarly and … Read more
Portrayed as a villain in Spotlight, the new film describing the clergy abuse scandal, Jack Dunn, the media spokesman for Boston College and trustee for Boston College High School, has hired a lawyer to demand that the scene portraying him as a cold and callous bureaucrat—caring nothing for victims—be stricken from the film. The scene … Read more
IN CONGRESS November 1, 1777 FORASMUCH as it is the indispensable Duty of all Men to adore the superintending Providence of Almighty God; to acknowledge with Gratitude their Obligation to him for Benefits received, and to implore such farther Blessings as they stand in Need of: And it having pleased him in his abundant Mercy, … Read more
“If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one.” This dialogue sums up the primary lesson of the film Spotlight, currently playing in a major nationwide release. The movie, “based on actual events” and starring Michael Keaton, chronicles a Boston Globe four-person investigative team’s discovery of Cardinal Bernard … Read more
Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror is the earliest adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula coming as it did just over 20 years after the novel’s publication in 1897. In some ways, however, that’s where any similarity ends. Book and subsequent film emerge from different worlds and through different mediums. In both good appears to triumph, and … Read more
I had thought Jennifer Roback Morse was getting to the heart of the matter when she pivoted to a focus on the victims of the Sexual Revolution. Her undoubtedly correct view is that gay so-called “marriage” did not start with the gays; rather, the Sexual Revolution prepared the ground beginning in the 1960s. In The … Read more
During the debates leading up to the 1983 pastoral letter of the bishops of the United States on nuclear weapons, “The Challenge of Peace,” the great churchman Archbishop Philip Hannan of New Orleans said that many of the bishops were uninformed. I paraphrase, because the archbishop himself used much more colorful language, honed by years of … Read more
As the recent Starbucks red cup dustup shows, boycotts and rumors of boycotts will always be with us. It seems like there never really was any active Starbucks boycott over the cups, and one wonders if the whole thing was simply a public relations ploy. However, there are many actual current boycotts. A quick search … Read more
Since the release of a Pew Research Center report last spring on the “Changing Religious Landscape,” media outlets have suggested that the declines in Church affiliation indicate that the United States is becoming a nation that has given up on God. NPR claims that Americans—especially young Americans—have lost their faith. Now, a study reported in … Read more
While students have caused a ruckus on several campuses in recent days, one particularly noisy and increasingly popular student coalition has made itself heard locally and nationally. Collectively called The University of Missouri’s “Student 1950,” they bear a name meant to commemorate the year the first black students were admitted to MU. While all of the … Read more
Events of recent memory have left my head spinning in disbelief—“Caitlyn,” same-sex so-called “marriage,” three women “marrying” in South America, and, yes, “gay Catholics” and “chaste gay couples.” With me, you may wonder how all this has emerged in a short few decades of social upheaval. I may have an answer: Society has constructed an … Read more
The Canadian painter Alex Colville (1920-2013) was that most curious of artistic hybrids, both a realist and a modernist. Art critic Jeffrey Myers, in an article entitled “Dangerously Real,” called Colville “one of the greatest modern realist painters.” Colville’s paintings reproduce ordinary objects, people, scenes—indeed the more ordinary, the better—with near-photographic realism. Each of his … Read more
“The essential architecture, if you will, of the struggle between good and evil in our times has grown ever more intense, and the warnings I sought to convey through the novel remain no less urgent.” ∼ Michael O’Brien, Preface, Elijah in Jerusalem “Do you remember what happened to Elijah?… On Horeb, he (Elijah) would get … Read more
By the time Chris Harper-Mercer killed himself on October 1, he had already killed and wounded a number of people at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, and sent the rest of the nation reeling in shock after yet another shooting spree. I will never forget the first time I ever heard of a public … Read more